Thursday, November 20, 2014

In the news

RIP Mike Nichols. Beware of lefty nostalgia; he's one they loved. I have no idea what his politics were if anything. Diane Sawyer's hot (face it, that's why she's been on camera; nothing wrong with that) and comes from a great though establishment conservative background (daddy was a Southern politician and she worked for Nixon); the establishment right and left are a Punch-and-Judy show, and you don't get a great media career if you have the right views, except maybe if you were Pat Buchanan decades ago.

Hermaphrodites. In the spotlight as one claims to have been intimate with a rather well-known athlete. Making the news as part of World War T (trannies), which is part of World War G (gays); #firstworldproblems. The left claims to love nature except for having sex without babies and babies without sex (so gays can adopt their little eugenic fantasy conceived in a lab rather than an Asian baby), and pretending men can be women (L-O-L-A, Lola), for example. It seems to me DNA (a read of the chromosomes) will tell you what someone with this rare problem really is. Might these people be chimeras with both male and female DNA?

"Teenage exorcists." An Arizona minister and cute girls go on an exorcism crusade against Harry Potter. The British press gets to ridicule religion. I've heard nothing but bad about Ouija boards. (Except for one recent article claiming that before The Exorcist they were seen as a harmless game, an excuse to hold your date's hand while using them.) My fifth-grade teacher, who happened to be a Catholic raised before Vatican II, said she and a friend played with one, were scared by predictions coming true, and burned it. The actor Christopher Lee, who's into the occult, says it does psychological damage. Pretty girls with the crosses but I fear they're taking on more than they can handle, if they're for real. The minister father may be sincere or it could be self-promotion (nothing per se wrong with that), or even clever marketing from the Harry Potter franchise. Interesting that he's dressed like a priest; our culture "knows" that's what an exorcist looks like. I'm not biting; as far as I know, Harry Potter is like folklore.

The moral-panic truth-o-meter.Takimag's Kathy Shaidle used to be a professional Catholic writer; unsurprisingly, the great priest sex scandal ("Think of the CHILDREN!") disappeared when the media couldn't hide that the perpetrators were gay (and the "children" often weren't children). Fun to watch the left cannibalize itself when it can't hide a story; then its hierarchy of truths kicks in: get whitey, followed by anti-Christian, so girls and gays get thrown under the bus for Mohammedans who abuse them. Got it? Good. Now shut up or you're fired.

Lefty Orthodox hand-wringing. Lesser known than the ethnics or the hyperdox-Herman converts but they exist, and they're peeved. "We don't want to be a high-church sect" so please don't come in, embarrassing conservatives, or change your mind at the door. (Their snotty imitators in the Byzantine Catholic churches are the same way.) If you thought you were buying a hedge against Modernism, think again. Episcopalians with beards. It's Rome or the abyss, folks.

Webmasters have managed to make something even more annoying and browser-clogging than pop-up boxes, but just as useless for advertising: sound and video that play automatically. I thought designers learned 15 years ago that autoplay music on a page is a turnoff. What gives?